Dear Alexandre,

I am not sure, if I ever mentioned my Vampire phase to you. Disappointedly, I wasn’t a Vampire back then, but I enjoyed Vampire stories, as it is common in depressed, slightly suicidal teenagers. My favorite Vampire is Lestat de Lioncourt from Anne Rice (before her fall into religious weirdness) and although he is French and moves later to the US, I could imagine him living in the striking Palais Coburg in Vienna that sits on top of a still existing piece of city wall. Back when I was going to school close to it, it hasn’t been renovated yet and the garden looked beautifully wild – a sleeping gem in a cloak of green, very vampiry in my eyes. You might have heard that the old Vampire legends come from east Europe and to that I have to say, that the knowledge of a map might come in handy, because when you look at it with geographical interest rather than political, you will find that Vienna is a very eastern city for middle Europe and yes, when you look it up you will also find that Eastern Austria is usually named in lists that show places where Vampirism was part of peoples superstitions.

But whilst I completely understand why writers see Vienna as good place for their Vampire novel or Vampire role playing game to take place in, in real life it lacks in Vampire culture. Morbid culture on the other hand is always thriving in my home town 😉.

There were other parts of Habsburg Austria that had much more Vampire stuff to deal with. In the 16th century as refugees were settled down in regions that are now in Serbia and Bosnia the Vampire myth started to appear in documents. I have to remind you that our Vampires back then, weren’t as sexy and sophisticated as the later appearing American ones. They were also less into blood sucking and more into mysteriously killing people in their sleep. As a kind of Vampire panic started to spread, doctors and priests were sent by the Habsburgs to investigate the situation. And as an English man wrote down such a story, a Vampire craze started and burned through English speaking countries as well. The whole thing seemed to be out of hand and finally it was Maria Theresia who sent out her own doctor to investigate the superstitions of the ordinary people, as they called it back then.

This man was Gerard Van Swieten, a doctor from the Netherlands. He played an important role in the Enlightenment movement and was called to Vienna by Maria Theresia’s Enlightenment-loving husband Franz Stephan von Lothringen (the one who founded two of my favorite places, the zoo and the natural history museum). Van Swieten founded the botanical garden that you can find besides the garden of Schloss Belvedere as a way to study and produce medicine. He also helped founding the Josephinum, a school for doctors of the military, but now a really great museum full of astounding medical wax figures from back then – a marvelous place. But like my favorite magicians like Penn & Teller and James Randi he fought against superstitions. So he was the man that Maria Theresia sent out to Moravia to investigate the whole Vampire thing. Van Swieten wrote a whole piece about his findings and he explained every symptom that the superstition saw as a sign of clear Vampirism away.

Was a dead body suspected of being a Vampire, townsfolk would exhume the suspect. If fingernails, hair and teeth had grown since death – which would also give me something to think about – it was a clear sign of a Wiederkehrer, a returner. But dead bodies dry up quite fast, so the skin is retrieving, showing more of the fingernails, the teeth and even the hair – also I doubt that they really made precise measurements of the fingernails before they put someone to the grave… But yeah, superstition is not a fan of the scientific method, but really loves following creepy feelings as evidence…

Blood was found coming out of the mouth or other orifices – a Vampire! A Vampire! Van Swieten and his colleagues saw that differently and I as a diligent fan of the “Ask a Mortician”-channel disagree as well. When a dead body decomposes it usually starts from within. When the bacteria break down cells, the tissue liquifies and then it will drop out wherever gravity takes it. It is a dark brown to black decomposition smoothie and can drop out of the mouth, the nose, the eyes. It can look scary, but as usual it will not look as scary as depicted in movies of the horror genre.

There is this myth that you can hear a Vampire chewing his shroud, which is explained by people hearing gases from the decaying process moving underground. It is said that they kill people out of their grave till their shroud is all eaten up (tiny shrouds might have helped against this problem, don’t you think?).

So the whole Vampire-myth is based on people’s guesses how decomposed a dead body has to look like after a certain amount of time. The knowledge that this is very much dependent on the weather and the soil and how you bury your dead would have spoiled all the fun of god-fearing exhuming Vampire hunters of those days.

But the main problems with Vampires was that they visit you at night, try to strangle you in a nightmare and suck out all your life-juices so you will become weaker and weaker until you die yourself and nobody wants that shit! So we have a situation, where death swoops through a village and people are dying left and right. So some villagers go to the cemetery and start digging up freshly diseased bodies. They behead them, cut their hearts out, set them on fire and drink the ashes with a bit of water – that is what disease control looked like in some regions back then. Gerard Van Swieten and his colleagues did not like that. The medical knowledge about plagues and epidemics were still far off from what we know today, but that this behavior was dangerous bullshit was pretty clear to see even back then. So in a rare case of ruling over the church, Maria Theresia (who was a horribly strict catholic) outlawed digging up bodies, vandalizing them and also burning them. She made it clear that Vampirism was just a superstition and should be treated as such even by the church. Of course this was only possible, because the pope himself had the same idea. So the church was suddenly acting like they had never believed in Vampires although priests throughout the land had taken part and strongly supported the idea of the undead killing off their relatives.

If you still hold on to that map, you might say: “Hold on a minute! That was in Moravia and in Serbia and in other places, but not really in Vienna.” And you are absolutely right. “But I saw an advert for a guided Vampire-tour through the inner city of Vienna. There must be Vampire stories out there, otherwise this guided tours would be based on nothing!” And I hear you. Although it does not really sound like you. You would probably just ask: “So is this bullshit?” And I would nod. “Oh yes, these tour guides are desperate to fulfill the needs of their scandal hungry customers.” I mean, they totally have the right to do that. No costumer can complain that Vampire stories of the supernatural were fake in the end, right?

If you book such a tour, they will bring you to the Blutgasse – yeah, the street of blood! I hope you shiver a bit. The Blutgasse is in one of the oldest bits of Vienna just behind the Stephansdom. You can use it if you need to go to the Mozarthaus, but it is not that practical of a street that I would have used it often.

The first time I walked through, I was a little kid and my mother showed me the street sign and said: “This is the Bluuuutgasse!” It smelled amazingly strong of dog shit. It is a weird street, because it runs between the backsides of the buildings left and right. The guide will probably start with the story that the street might have its name from the massacre of the Knights Templar, whose blood ran down the street – which there is not a hint of evidence for. Way more funny is that the street used to be called Kotgässel, which means “little street of shit” – which fits way more to my experience with it. Because it was a backside street the people in the buildings used it as a dump for manure and their own excrements. My personal theory is that inhabitans there weren’t happy to live at shit street and blood sounds more noble and more sophisticated. For this theory I have exactly as much evidence as folks who tell you about the blood of the Templars. Because that is not much for a tour, the guide will claim that in this very street the Blutgräfin Báthory had owned a building – a story which is also not certified. Maybe you are not familiar with the Comtesse of Blood, Erzsébet (Elisabeth) Báthory. Okay, strap in! The Báthorys were a very rich and influential noble family from Hungary. They were so rich that the Habsburgs had lent money from them for a war. Erzsébet and her husband lived in a castle not that far from my home in modern Slovakia, but back then it was Hungary. When her husband died, she became the richest woman in Europe or such record. She owned vast lands and also palais and buildings in big cities like Vienna, which certainly brought in some good money as well. She was rich, she was a noblewoman and she was single, so the same old story that happens so often, happened to her: A male family member broke into her castle, killed almost everyone and captured her and some of her servants. He claimed that she was a witch, killed one servant right there, after holding court in his mind and tortured the others till they were ready to say in court that they helped their lady doing all her witchy murdery things. Lady Báthory was charged with 300 murders or such an insane number. It was said that she lured young women into her castle to kill them and that she tortured her young maids to death. Of course that nice relative tried to “legally” kill her, but some more powerful male relative stopped him (she was the sister of the king of Poland) and ruled that she will held captive in the tower of her castle. Although she was in deep, deep trouble she somehow managed to secretly see her three children and she made a legal testament that split up her fortune to be inherited to her children. She died two years after her imprisonment, but I guess she managed that her judgmental relative, who obviously was killing and torturing in the name of God without having any ulterior motives, didn’t get anything. I don’t know, if she herself tortured and murdered, but it is kind of clear that the claims were not based on any evidence at all. A Jesuit in the 18th century rewrote the court files from the 16th century and put some fictious details in that were really juicy. Now the Comtesse murdered young women to bathe in their blood – people loved that story. It would rejuvenate her and he wrote in, how she felt like the sprinkles of blood on her skin made her feel fresh and young again. So she became a famous serial murder that is still mentioned today by people who refuse to read her Wikipedia-entry. So, was she a Vampire? She is sometimes one since the 70’ties. Yes, the 1970’ies. Because at this point in time someone had the idea to make a female Dracula figure out of her and put her in a movie. I am a bit annoyed by that. But that is the reason why Bram Stoker probably didn’t base anything in Dracula on her story. Back then, she was a witch not a vampire – very different things!

But you know, who Bram Stoker actually based a whole character on? Yes! Gerard van Swieten! I often wondered why Van Helsing was from the Netherlands, now I know. Although I doubt Van Swieten would feel honored by it. He helped ending the Vampire Superstition (to some degree), but Bram Stoker made him hunt a real Vampire. He became the most famous male Vampire Hunter  - we all know, who the most famous female one is, right? – but he was the one who fought against the mutilation of dead bodies. Maybe one day his character will star in a Viennese action TV series – Gerard Van Swieten, the Vampire-Hunter Hunter!

There is a statue of Gerard Van Swieten at one side of the Maria-Theresia-Denkmal that you can find between the Kunsthistorische and the Naturhistorische Museum. He stands there representing science and art in front of composer Willibald Gluck, a very young Mozart and our old friend Joseph Haydn. You can also visit the Botanical Garden of the University Vienna at Rennweg 14. At the moment it is open from 10am to 6pm. I should also go there as my last time was when I was a kid. And I will think of Vampires, when I walk through the over 11.000 different plants – and you can so too. So these are places that I might choose for a vampire tour 😆😂.

Keep your teeth sharp and enjoy Vienna 🌟